


Not Like Regular People

by applecameron



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 09:07:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6148540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecameron/pseuds/applecameron





	Not Like Regular People

Eames isn't sane, not like regular people.  He's not regular people.  He just plays regular people, in dreams.  He has a hole in his mind, space carefully filled by his forges.

As he gets older, though, the hole gets bigger. There's less and less of the original Eames, whoever he was, whether it was knobby knees in short pants, boarding school, and aristocratic accents, or the colonial trappings of former imperial possessions, spicy breakfasts and sacred cows walking down dusty paths in the hot sun.

From the outside, Africa was an undiscovered continent.  Joseph Conrad said so, didn't he?  But that's just a forge imposed by the white man.  Just like Eames is white, and a man, on the outside.  It may be why Eames, insane Eames, Eames with the hole in his mind, feels comfortable there.  There are so many invisible things for him to sift through, there.

Eames-the-forger is a forge:  the military background long repressed, save for excellent reflexes and a quick hand with a knife; the smirk, the easy smile, the cultivated reputation as a gambler.

Lies.  All of it.  That Eames came into existence when he joined dreamshare.  He remains loosely tethered to it.  Only loosely.

There's almost no original Eames left.  Exhibit A:  He looked at his father's obituary, years ago, and it took minutes to recognize who it was.  That this was the man who'd fathered him.  He didn't remember the name, the face, the biography.  If not for the "survived by" followed by his mother's first name, which he still knew, he would have just read it and thought to himself, another man, dead.  Crumbled into dust and spread out under the hot sun.

He has to keep filling the hole up with new forges, or someone will notice.

Arthur already has, but he doesn't mind.  

Arthur has his own holes.  His last name was taken away, eaten by the American government.  They started on him when he was a child.  Eating him in bits and pieces long before he met his military butchers, the ones who sculpted him with their knives and drugs, down to a near cadaver.  He escaped being consumed completely, barely, with a PASIV, a first name, an inability to keep weight on and a tendency to scream at things in the middle of the night that aren't actually there.

Eames is very comfortable at night.  In the dark.  With Arthur.  At night, his hole just looks like shadows on the wall.  At night, he pets Arthur when he screams, when he pants, and tells him it's just a different kind of projection that only Arthur can see.  It's not a regular people.  It's an important distinction.

Rule Number One: Don't shoot regular people, unless absolutely necessary.  Other regular people will come after you.  It's most disconcerting.  Almost projection-like.  And it does not do to forget you're not dreaming.

Eames does not like crowds of regular people for this and other reasons.  He lurks around edges if he's following a mark, stays invisible.  Uses an observational forge, never does it as 'himself', whoever that is.  Protects whatever it is that's left.  Picks up random and not-so-random details.

He has a poker chip; some people think it is his totem.  It's not.  He got one when he first started, but the edges of the hole expanded and he forgot it.  He wonders what will happen when the hole is as big as Eames is.  Will he notice?  Or will he just fill up the hole, with more things, experiences, observations, other people's details, and keep going, Arthur by his side?

Maybe.

 

 


End file.
